It doesn’t take a genius to see why so many high-tech businesses prefer to be located in the Route 1 Corridor regardless of how walkable or bikeable it is (see page 10). The workforce is just plain smart. The proof is in the patents.
Time set out to discover which municipality in America produced the most innovation. To do this, they crunched a massive data set of 2.2 million patents issued between 1976 and 2016, looking for the locations of the individuals or companies that filed the patents. They then divided the number of patents by the number of town residents to figure out which place got the most patents per capita.
Princeton, with about 28,000 people and 10,000 patents, was the clear winner. However, there is room to quibble with the ranking, since many of the patents came from adjoining towns that have a Princeton address. One example: the RCA Labs (later the Sarnoff Research Corporation), which is in West Windsor despite its Princeton mailing address.
Even so, being named the number one “Genius City” seems likely to add to the aura of prestige surrounding the Princeton name.
